Renowned Kenyan academic, Ali Mazrui,
yesterday died in the US at the age of 81 after a
protracted illness.
Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta said Africa
had been robbed of one of its greatest scholars.
Mazrui had been a "towering" academic whose
“intellectual contributions played a major role in
shaping African scholarship,” he added.
He had been a professor at Binghamton
University in New York at the time of his death.
According to a BBC report, his body will be flown
to Kenya for burial, said Khelef Khalifa, chairman
of Kenya's Muslims for Human Rights group.
“His nephew, Alamin Mazrui, has confirmed that
the professor's wish was to be buried in Kenya,”
he was quoted by the local Daily Nation
newspaper as saying.
Mazrui was a leading pan-Africanist whose
academic research focused on African politics,
north-south relations and political Islam. He had
authored numerous books, including The
Africans: A Triple Heritage and Christianity and
Islam in Africa's Political Experience: Piety,
Passion and Power.
Mazrui became popular in Nigeria through the
television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage,
which was jointly produced by the BBC and the
Public Broadcasting Service (WETA, Washington)
in association with the Nigerian Television
Authority (NTA). As the creator and narrator of
the documentary, which was watched by millions
in the 1980s, he became a household name in
Nigeria.
Mazrui studied at schools in Mombasa, Kenya,
and obtained his B.A. with Distinction from
Manchester University in Great Britain in 1960,
his M.A. from Columbia University in New York
in 1961, and his doctorate (DPhil) from Oxford
University (Nuffield College) in 1966.
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